The African American Irish Diaspora Network, in partnership with New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House, the Office of Global Inclusion, and the John Brademas Center, along with NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, announces its November 1, 2023 public interview with journalist and NYU professor, Rachel L. Swarns, who will discuss her groundbreaking new book, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (Random House, 2023). Based on painstaking research, The 272 tells the story of the Black families at the heart of early Catholic America. Swarns is a journalism professor at NYU and a contributing writer for The New York Times.
“Through her prodigious research, expert storytelling, and deep empathy for the victims of slavery, Rachel L. Swarns has produced an absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church.”– Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth
Black, Brown and Green Voices is a documentation strategy and public humanities initiative founded by Miriam Nyhan Grey. Grey is a founding board member of the African American Irish Diaspora Network.
NYU’s Kimberly DaCosta, author of Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford University Press, 2007), will introduce the program.
The program is presented with support from the Irish government’s Emigrant Support Program.